Villette draws on her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. Lucy Snowe, the narrator of this book, flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the great cosmopolitan capital of Villette. Soon Lucys struggle for independence is overshadowed by both her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontes strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free.